Luxury Fashion’s Designer Diversity Problem

0:07Hello and welcome to the debrief from the business of fashion where each week we delve into our most popular BOF professional stories with the correspondents who created them. I'm senior correspondent Sheena Butler-Young. In October 2023, the French luxury conglomerate Caring announced that Sarah Burton, Alexander McQueen's creative director for 13 years, would be succeeded by Sean McGeer, J.W. Anderson's then head of Ready to Wear. A photo compilation of Caring's six creative directors immediately began circulating on social media. a full house of all-white, all-male creative directors. Caring declined to comment, but many in the industry were left wondering, where is the diversity in luxury fashion leadership?

0:52Myself and BOF's luxury editor, Robert Williams, wrote an article at that time titled, Luxury Fashion's Designer Diversity Problem Persist. Robert is here with me today to talk about luxury fashion's diversity problem at the top and how it's evolving. Hi, Robert. Welcome to the Debrief podcast. Hi, Sheena. Thanks so much for having me. So, Robert, I want to go back to October 2023 when Caring appointed Sean McGare as its new creative director of Alexander McQueen. I remember it so vividly, that photo circulating all across social media, but I also remember the industry chatter that happened offline.

1:28What do you think was so interesting or peculiar about that appointment in particular that got people talking? You know, that appointment came after I think there had been previously a bit more momentum around diversity and particularly gender parity in these design roles. You know, there had been these really successful stories during Phoebe's time at Céline, which was followed by Claire Waite Keller being appointed the creative director at Givenchy, Maria Gratia Curie at Dior. And there was just a sense maybe that things were sliding backward. And that's why that got quite a bit of traction.

2:09And the optics just weren't good. But it really stirred up a debate and also kind of underscored how awkward these conversations can be and how it's hard to, you know, choose the right time and the right way to have them. because then there was quite a backlash to the backlash because, you know, the fact of Luxury's designer diversity problem, you know, isn't something that directly says something about whether or not Sean McGurr was a deserving candidate. He's a rather young, well-liked talent that people thought had so much potential. And so it felt like people then had a backlash to the backlash.

2:48So it was kind of, yeah, just underscored how tricky these conversations can be, especially for an industry that is not used to having them. Absolutely. You know, I remember at the time working on that story and one of the first calls I made to a recruiter on the topic of a lack of diversity. She said to me, I don't think you should write this story because it's going to make Sean feel bad. I remember that very well. But I think some of the backlash also, to your point, reflected that consumer expectations were sort of changing in that moment. Would you agree with that? As it was consumers driving the conversation, maybe not the industry insiders?

3:23Yeah, I think it was a mix of both in that instance. But certainly you've had other moments where brands really didn't show a great deal of sensitivity to different racial topics, the way that different ethnicities and races expect to be spoken to and represented in creative work. I think that is the sense among consumers that brands need to do a better job of respecting them and respecting their diversity is strongest in the US because of the relationship between luxury brands and black culture goes back so far to the 1980s. You just have so many champions of luxury brands coming out of hip hop.

4:07That's certainly an expectation that more and more customers have wanted to make known. In other regions, I'm not sure that it's as pronounced. I think in China, there is increasingly a sense that brands need to really respect different cultural sensitivities there. But I'm not sure that they would expect diversity, so to speak. You know, they would say these French companies, they imagine French people as looking a certain way. And so they wouldn't be surprised if French or Italian companies are hiring people that look that way. So there are a handful of success stories, though, at the big luxury fashion houses across Europe.

4:45Obviously, the late Virgil Abloh, Olivier at Balmain, and now Pharrell at Louis Vuitton. But overall, diversity in the top creative roles remain scarce. What do you think are the toughest barriers, especially in Europe then? So there's an expectation of what it should look like. Is there anything else driving the resistance to have more diversity to show up, even if it's not explicitly described as let's diversify? Yeah. I mean, there are people that are much better positioned to speak to this than me, people who have experienced this kind of adversity themselves. But as a luxury correspondent and someone who's lived in France for 10 years, I would say that particularly in the French luxury industry, you have a few factors.

5:26You have that compared to the United States, a lot of the diversity in France is coming from very recent immigration. And there's a lot of economic migration. People who maybe are coming from a background that's so disadvantaged economically, and then also then in education, that the companies feel like it's not their role to help to close that gap if people, if the candidates are not looking as prepared and as qualified on paper. That's certainly generally a way, I think, a bigger issue in French business as well, about not looking at diversity with the same rigor that the culture has evolved to doing so in the United States.

6:08Then you also have some thornier cultural traditions, like there's a sense that's kind of going back to the 1930s and 40s and the Holocaust about the government not being supposed to take statistics about race and religion and about people. So actually, they like to have lots of blind data and live in a world that they imagine is driven by total meritocracy, which makes it really hard to take action on closing those gaps if you think that people have had unequal opportunities. Any kind of positive discrimination is not easy to execute here because of just the cultural sensitivities around that.

6:49And the fact that they really don't track or monitor data. The government doesn't. And then companies follow suit, as do a lot of schools. Are there programs, though, at big conglomerates like Caring or LVMH that are popping up that attempt to move the needle on kind of education access? I've heard some chatter around that. Like, we know that education is expensive. We know that unpaid internships are prevalent. Also here in the U.S., by the way, this idea of who gets access to fashion because it is such a sort of closed off industry with a high barrier of entry. Have you seen anything crop up in terms of the big luxury houses offering programs?

7:26I've heard a little bit. Have you seen that? I think in terms of it being explicitly about having more racial diversity, no. in terms of reaching out to job candidates in less economically advantaged areas, which might be in turn much more diverse. I think LVMH has a program for like a kind of roadshow for internships and apprenticeships that they take around to lots of different towns and places where you wouldn't really have that luxury and fashion culture and the contacts in the industry otherwise. They've been doing that for a few years. And I think it's, I went to one of these events and it was quite interesting to see all these LVMH executives and representatives from all of the brands in a rather disadvantaged suburb, I think like 45 minute commute outside of Paris.

8:19At Caring, I think you have a real focus on gender parity. They've put a really strong focus on this in their corporate communications, in their identity as an employer, and really led the charge about having some of the best benefits for young mothers and for the return to work. And they've been a big part of that kind of movement in the corporate world, really keeping up with industries that try to be best in class about this, like tech companies like Google. How far is the pipeline from a program like that all the way to the high profile creative director slot, though? Is that going to move the needle at all?

8:58And if it is, how far down the line do you see that manifest at the top? Yeah, in creative roles, I think it's a lot trickier because there's just so much less structure around this. And the designers and their immediate assistants have a lot of authority to kind of build a team around the young people that they know or the people who inspire them. It's a very social industry. It's a very contacts and relationship driven industry. And so reinforcing diversity is quite tricky. If the people in positions of power don't have, you know, a really diverse social group around them, it's going to be less and less likely that they're going to find out about an interesting talent, someone that they want to kind of cut into the action in terms of their studio.

9:44And also the job itself is sort of hazy in nature, right? So we've seen the creative director role as it's designed sort of stretched to include everyone from garment technicians to models and actors and other cultural curators. So that can make it a little bit harder, I imagine, to apply sort of a rigorous DE &I criteria to this role, would you say? For sure. I think it's a role that's been evolving a lot. I think that you have more diverse profiles coming into the role, as you point out, people like Pharrell Williams, who comes from an entertainment background, or the late Virgil Abloh, who had this like unformally trained, and he was trained as an architect, and then this background coming up, working in hip-hop culture, working together on fashion with Kanye West, who really had this huge cultural value added in terms of the kinds of audiences he could speak to through his work.

10:40And so I think you do see more diversity if someone has this kind of different profile that they can really bring something like that to the table. I think when it's about the creative director defined in a very traditional sense, in terms as a person who is imposing a certain point of view about silhouette, about color, about taste, taking things like blue or yellow in which there's not a right or a wrong answer in the wider world and make luxury as a world where there is a right and a wrong answer. And there's someone that you look to to decide what is the look right now. That role is so much about imposing this authority from the top.

11:23And while that's not how everyone operates a brand anymore, and a lot of the most successful brands are more in dialogue with their customers. You know, when you have that tradition, I think then that makes it harder and harder for people who don't fit the bill of what someone is used to seeing as a person of authority and in power to rise up. It's a role where I think people's unconscious biases really can come into play because whether or not they receive something as good design or bad design is going to be so much influenced by the person who told them that it's good design or bad design and, you know, how much credence they lend to that person's opinion.

12:04Absolutely. So I want to pivot a little bit to an area of the industry where we have seen some movement, which is really around gender diversity. So we have Sarah Burton at Givenchy, Virginie VR at Chanel, who recently stepped down. And then now Claire Waite Keller, the British stylist and designer who has very long resume of luxury roles from Chloe to Givenchy. And now she's at Uniglow making that pivot to mass brands. So while we see more women in these roles, it's not an easy path for these women. There's unique set of complicated challenges that they too face. So Wade Keller spoke to Imran Ahmed, BOF's founder and CEO on the BOF podcast this week.

12:45here's what she had to say. I think many women designers go through the industry and just slowly sort of fall away for various different reasons because the top, it's still fairly male dominated in management and across the sort of business side of fashion. I think a lot of women choose to have families and so they might exit the industry for a year or two. And I very quickly realized in my career that that was just not an option. I can't step off the bus. I've got to keep on it. And so I had to make my family work around my career because I knew the minute I went off, even a season out in fashion can put you back a year and people look at you differently.

13:32So I really feel a lot of women probably struggle with that. And it's unfortunately because there isn't openness to flexibility in working still. Potentially, a lot of companies don't have that facility or the ability to do that. So as Claire sort of just said, the lack of gender parity in top roles isn't unique to fashion, but it's especially pressing here given that women make up so much of the consumer for the industry, roughly 60 percent, according to some metrics, and they're also the biggest bulk of the workforce producing the garments. Robert, What's your understanding of what the challenges are for women creative directors in fashion?

14:13I think there are definitely some unique challenges for women, which maybe some of those have turned into opportunities or the very successful examples you mentioned at the top of this segment. You know, people like Maria Grazia or Virginie Villar at Chanel are people who are kind of taking these challenges and turning them into opportunities. What I would mean by that is that just because of sexism and because of that creative director role, as we discussed being so much about being able to impose your authority, you know, there is a bigger challenge for a woman to come in and say, this is my point of view on what is good taste, what is good design on how clothes should look and how people should dress.

14:57it's more challenging for them to come in and be listened to. And then that sort of snowball effect and that echo chamber that people are so good at working in fashion. And that's such a big part of it where, you know, you say that something is how people should dress. People start dressing that way. Then you've been proven right. It's harder for them to maybe insert themselves sometimes as women. At the same time, I think because it's more challenging for them to just defend a creative notion based on its sheer creativity. Women have had to maybe back up their creative contributions with commercial results.

15:33And I think when you look at the women at the top of the luxury industry, you have a group of women who really know how to say something on the runway and say something with the brand, but then also really to back that up with products that women will want to buy and wear. I don't think they really have a choice. I think if a woman creative director is in a senior role and the collection isn't selling, I don't think they're going to get maybe the same patience that some of these men who historically were kind of dubbed visionary designers had, and they could get countless investors to bail them out if you were to look at the careers back in the 80s and 90s of some of these huge design stars of that generation.

16:18Yet now you have these very established women who know how to operate, who know how to produce a collection, who know how to merchandise it, who know how to work between the business side, the creative studio in terms of the runway and the merchandising, and to work with image making and with production, with ateliers and factories. That kind of rigorous, transversal knowledge that's very collaborative is, I think, where something that brands have started to put more value on. So women are criticized more. They have to work harder to be deemed successful. Should that be the gold standard, though?

16:58I mean, really not, obviously. And we can only hope that that will start to budge. but we certainly have seen that women have been able to increasingly brush off things like bad reviews based on the commercial success of their fashion but i don't think that that's should be the gold standard i mean i think hopefully we see some movement you have some creative young brands that probably are not you know commercial juggernauts out of the gate right now that we're seeing in Fashion Week. You have Moa Lola, who's showing occasionally at different Fashion Weeks she showed in Paris and in London. There's a designer named Dilara, who has a really interesting, exciting brand.

17:41You also have Nancy Dejaca, who has been able to start to build a business, but it's still a rather fledgling label. And so that these women are managing to get people to pay attention and have people come to their shows, even though what they're doing is not like a cash cow for any kind of luxury investor yet. I think that's a good sign, but we're still a long way from women being in these roles where they're kind of venerated as the creative genius and the poet who is determining the story of a luxury brand. If you look at the way people talk about women designers and about men, there's certainly a gap in the kind of respect and seriousness with which they speak about their work, with the exception of Mrs.

18:31Prada, who has a rather unique situation, having built that reputation since the early 90s. So this month, Sarah Burton was appointed creative director of Givenchy. What does an appointment like that do to continue to advance some of this diversity progress on the luxury side? Does that move the needle at all? You know, I think Sarah Burton is someone who has really proven themselves over decades of doing very rigorous, fantastic work as a designer. She's a very respected designer, and so that she's gotten a very prestigious and special fashion house is certainly a good sign. It's another step toward parody in this industry.

19:10On the other hand, though, I would have to say, it does underscore some of the challenges for a woman creative director, because I think there was so much momentum around the notion of Sarah going to Givenchy because of this idea that she was following in Lee McQueen's footsteps. You know, Sarah Burton, she was Lee McQueen's assistant in the late 90s at Alexander McQueen and then ended up taking over from him after his death. And so, you know, she's been following in his footsteps her whole life in a lot of ways, even though she's certainly made her mark on McQueen. So that now she's gone to Givenchy, where Lee McQueen was also creative director and had a very famous kind of spectacular tenure in the late 90s.

19:55There's something a bit sad that that's the opportunity that's being extended. At the same time, that's just one part of the story. And I think it's a terrific opportunity for her. You know, she could really help to balance out some of the different things that Givenchy has been trying to do in the past few years. They're trying to juggle that street and streetwear and merch identity and kind of edgy identity that they had had under Ricardo Tichy. And then again with Matthew Williams, with this very Parisienne identity that's very couture. And I think if you look at her work at Alexander McQueen, these are kind of references.

20:35And these are notes that she's quite used to playing simultaneously and mixing. So it's nice to see the industry give her another platform to really do what she does well. You know, Robert, I'd love to get more into the racial diversity part of it. I imagine that should really just be its own episode at this point. The issues of, as we've discussed them today, are far too complicated to even attempt to dissect, much less resolve in the context of a single episode. So if you had to call it when it comes to racial diversity, gender diversity at luxury fashion brands? Where do we go from here? What I would really like to see happen is a diverse profile that doesn't have, you know, these huge leg ups in terms of like the audience they're bringing to the table.

21:23Pharrell's appointment at Louis Vuitton is a spectacular moment for visibility for Black culture and for Black Americans in the heart of European design. It's a breakthrough moment following on, you know, what that brand did with Virgil Abloh. But I'd love to see someone with a really diverse background like that who doesn't already have millions of followers being given a chance. You've had in the past few years, unknown designers, young designers getting big breaks, people like Daniel Lee when he was named to be creative director at Bottega Veneta, people like Sean McGurr at Alexander McQueen.

22:03I think it's a big question is, when is someone at that level, someone that's a bit more untested, going to be given a chance that isn't someone that looks like we've been taught for a creative director to look? So we've had some moments where progress was evident for Rowlett Louis Vuitton, Sarah Givenchy, and then Claire making that pivot to mass with Uniqlo, but also having that long career and luxury. So progress looks like more moments like this and more opportunities for untested and lesser known racially diverse talent, including women. Robert, I think we can end it there. Thank you so much for joining us today and for sharing your insights on such a critical topic.

22:41Oh, thank you so much for having me. Please be sure to check out Robert's article, Luxury Fashion's Designer Diversity Problem Persists and his ongoing coverage of the designer musical chairs in Paris on businessandfashion.com. These and other stories are available to BOF professional subscribers only, and you can find them in the links in the show notes. You've been listening to The Debrief, produced and edited by Olivia Davies, mixed and mastered by Eric Bria. I'm Sheena Butler-Young. We'll be back next week with a new episode. Thank you so much for joining us and be sure to follow us wherever you get your podcasts.

23:19Thank you.